For individual users and organizations alike, computers and computing technology are important and useful tools. Modem operating systems (OS) and utilities provide capabilities for a user to “roll back” or restore a system configuration to a previous state. This action is performed in the context of system attack, degradation, or damage resulting from a vulnerability exploitation, attack, virus, or conflicts which may occur as new software and drivers are installed on to a system.
A computer fundamentally relies upon its operating system, if any, and other installed software which can affect the computing state. Viruses, attacks, and other software programs or applications (“applications”) can detrimentally affect a computer's state and cause, often irreversible, errors and damage leading to an “infected state.”
Some examples of errors and damage that may occur include the elimination or over-writing of data on a hard drive, disk, storage array, etc. This information may include critical, valuable, or sensitive information. Other risks that may occur include vulnerability to third parties attempting to gain access to information on a particular hard drive, susceptibility to virus-borne attacks, non-operation of a computer after an attack has crippled the operating system, related files, or other important aspects of the computer.
System restoration and file restoration can be used to address problems resulting from failed or damaged computer states. Addressing vulnerability attacks, viruses, etc. often retroactively seek to restore the computer's state back to a safe point or safe state prior to the harmful event. System restoration techniques may restore the operating system, but may fail to restore any applications, data, or information that may have been written to the computer's memory between the last safe point and the harmful event. However, if a previous system configuration was previously infected with a computer virus, but since repaired, the roll back operation may revert the system to an infected state. A file restoration may also only restore particular files and not the entire state. Generally, restoring system or files/applications back to a safe point may only restore the previous state and not provide for security measures to ensure that the harmful, insecure events do not occur again.
Thus, there is a need for a solution to safely roll back a computer system image. More importantly, there is a need for a solution to safely roll back a computer system image to a secure state, providing security measures and updates to prevent vulnerability to future attacks, unwanted intrusions, viruses, etc. There is also a need to determine if the user can safely restore information from an earlier state, without invoking an infected state.